Weave coding into K-5 curricula as new literacies

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to posit that coding should be considered as a critical part of new literacies. Teacher educators should first adopt the new literacies perspective, and then prepare pre-service teachers to teach both traditional literacy and new literacies skills, especially preparing them how to weave coding into K-5 literacy curricula to cultivate younger learners’ new ways of expressions and computational thinking skills. To facilitate this educational transformation, low-cost Web 2.0 tools and apps were introduced as one practical approach, along with some literacy lesson ideas to help teacher educators and pre-service teachers begin to integrate coding into the K-5 literacy curricula.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is a viewpoint paper.

Findings

A table of low-cost Web 2.0 tools was presented with sample lesson ideas.

Originality/value

More than ever, coding breaks the traditional definition of literacy as paper-based reading and writing. It empowers students to read, write and create with multimodality on multiple platforms. Weaving coding into the literacy curricula offers the window to promote both computational thinking and new literacies skills. Teacher educators, among all other stakeholders, should begin the efforts to prepare pre-service teachers to weave coding into the literacy curricula and other content areas in the teacher educations programs now.

Citation

Jin, Y. and Zha, S. (2020), "Weave coding into K-5 curricula as new literacies", Information Discovery and Delivery, Vol. 48 No. 2, pp. 49-66. https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-09-2019-0069